August 4, 2010 7:56 am

One of the early themes of Pete Carroll’s first Seahawks training camp is the frequent use of game-type circumstances as teaching points. What looked like a team session on the typical two-minute drill recently was actually a great deal more specific.

“We actually worked with a situation that happened in the Super Bowl,” Carroll said. “We just chose that situation at 1:08, tie game, three timeouts to the offense, the ball got kicked off out of bounds at the 40-yard line. We just captured that situation. We went through it today with both the ones and the twos.”

To cement the lessons, Carroll later showed the team the video copy of how it actually played out in the Super Bowl, and was able to compare that to how the Hawks’ offense executed in that situation in practice.

It was a chance to review the best use of time outs, and the most efficient means of setting up for plays, and for field goals, he said. Carroll said there was very little reason to spend much time on these things at USC as “… we probably didn’t have four or five legitimate two-minute situations” the whole time he was there.

But in the NFL the games are so much closer that any number are decided in the final minute every week.

“It’s something that we will have to be very, very well-versed at,” Carroll said.

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Gregg Bell joined The News Tribune in July 2014. Bell had been the director of writing for the University of Washington's athletic department for four years. He was the senior national sports writer in Seattle for The Associated Press from 2005-10, covering the Seahawks in their first Super Bowl season and beyond. He's also been The Sacramento Bee's beat writer on the Oakland Athletics and Raiders. The native of Steubenville, Ohio, is a 1993 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and a 2000 graduate of the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

Mr_Fish, agreed, this was one of Holmy’s soft spots. But as Carroll said, at USC he “probably didn’t have four or five legitimate two-minute situations.” So our new coach is really the one who really needs to bone up and practice his clock management before he steps on the sideline with the clock running. Hasselbeck has handled plenty of these. Maybe he should be coaching these sessions.

I’m glad that the new coaching staff has thought about the situation and is taking measures to address it. It would have been all too easy for them to be arrogant or ignorant about it, but instead the potential need for this was recognized and a plan put in place to deal with it.

Even if they need to tweak how they teach this, just being aware of details like this and taking care of them is an encouraging sign. The downfall of many college coaches is not paying attention to detail, since superior college talent overcomes a lot of sins. Hopefully, this approach is reflected everywhere in the org.

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